Doctor Plans Offshore Clinic for Abortions
By LESLIE BERGER
s a child in the Netherlands, Rebecca
Gomperts often sailed with her family in
the chilly waters of the North Sea, a pastime
that left her with a seemingly fearless attraction
to things nautical. Today, as a 34- year-old
gynecologist and public health advocate, Dr.
Gomperts hopes to brave the elements again,
this time to offer abortions and other
reproductive services 12 miles offshore to
women who cannot obtain them legally at
home.
Her goal and that of her Amsterdam- based
group, the Women on Waves Foundation, is not only to help individual
women but to publicize a public health issue that remains taboo in many
parts of the world, despite estimates ranging from 60,000 to 100,000
deaths a year from unsafe abortions.
"The aim is to raise the issue, to make people aware," Dr. Gomperts said
in a recent fund-raising tour of the United States. "What we actually want
to do is just make visible in those countries what is now invisible."
Dr. Gomperts said she and her colleagues needed to raise $190,000 to
charter a Dutch ship where, according to their legal research, the
Netherlands' liberal abortion laws would prevail in international waters.
Dr. Gomperts said they already had in place a $50,000 mobile clinic that
was being built to be placed aboard a ship.
Advance publicity has already generated the kind of controversy and
open discussion she is seeking. In Malta, where abortion is strictly illegal,
news of the proposed ship set off protests but also drew out the
unexpected voices of abortion rights advocates.
"There were articles — and it's the first time ever there was this debate in
Malta — where you had women telling journalists their stories about how
they went to England to obtain their services," Dr. Gomperts said.
So far, her reception among American abortion rights advocates has
been warm but cautious. Concerns include the safety of patients traveling
to and from the ship, follow-up care to avoid infection, and whether
Women on Waves would even be allowed to anchor in some ports to
offer training, contraceptives and information, as Dr. Gomperts also
hopes to do.
Another concern raised here has been how outsiders can defend the
patients' individual rights without seeming to meddle in the native
countries' prevailing culture and inadvertently causing a backlash.
"I think her idea and her motivation are superb," said Dr. Allan
Rosenfield, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia.
"Whether it's practical is the issue, and that's what I'm not sure of."
Essential to the ship's success will be its prior contact with local women's
groups and whether a particular country already has a groundswell of
support for legalized abortion, said Cynthia Pearson, executive director
of the National Women's Health Network, based in Washington. Ms.
Pearson and Dr. Rosenfield said they had met with Dr. Gomperts.
A spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee in
Washington, Laura Echevarria, raised similar concerns for the safety of
the women who would be treated aboard the ship. "These woman are
almost being treated as guinea pigs in the pursuit of making a political
statement," she said. "We feel very saddened for the women who might
suffer as a result."
Kathleen Murphy, a lawyer for the committee's chapter in Manhattan,
called the idea an unethical attempt at "population control in third world
countries."
What is clear is that abortion remains a deeply divisive issue throughout
the world while the numbers of women suffering complications and even
death from unsafe procedures is widely viewed as a major public health
problem.
"There are women in almost all societies who are pregnant and don't
want to be and will go to any length to end it," Dr. Rosenfield said.
Just over a quarter of the world's people live in 74 countries where
abortion is generally banned, including much of Latin America, Africa and
Asia, according to the United Nation's Population Division and the
Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, a nonprofit research group
based in New York.
Some nations not only prohibit abortion but also imprison women who
illegally seek them, according to those sources, and at least one-fourth of
those who suffer complications and death from unsafe abortions are
teenagers.
An all-female staff — including a captain, deck hands, a nurse and Dr.
Gomperts herself — is also ready to set sail as soon as the money for a
two-month voyage is secured. The idea for the floating women's clinic
came to her between two stints as a ship's doctor for Greenpeace, Dr.
Gomperts said, and was also influenced by the desperation she had
witnessed among women during internships in Suriname and Guinea.
Dr. Gomperts, who said she attended nautical school in preparation for
the project, refused to discuss tactical details or the ship's planned first
stops. But she said Women on Waves would rely heavily on grass-roots
groups for guidance and support, including contact with women seeking
banned services and follow-up care. |
